 Hi, I'm Salvatore Babonis, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney and Director of the Indian Century Roundtable, Link Tank. Last November, I gave an interview at the India Today Conclave in Mumbai in which I criticized the major international rankings of Indian democracy made by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, and the Varieties of Democracy Institute. At the time, I focused on the text narratives offered by these three organizations in support of their negative rankings of Indian democracy. Now I have a new report coming out with the Indian Century Roundtable in which I investigate in detail the quantitative methodology behind the most important of these rankings, the Varieties of Democracy Institute or VDEM rankings. The VDEM rankings, it turns out, have very serious methodological flaws that lead it to mischaracterized not only Indian democracy but many democracies around the world. The VDEM rankings include five sub-indices of electoral democracy that don't really differentiate in many cases between sham democracies or even complete non-democracies like China, North Korea, and Cuba, and genuine democracies like India. On the two objective components of the VDEM rankings, that is universal suffrage and elected officials, communist countries, countries that have absolutely no elections, are able to get perfect scores on these rankings because the objective criteria are simply based on what's written in their constitutions without regard to the actual functioning of democracy or lack of democracy in those countries. On the third of the five sub-indices, free and fair elections, which is a mix of objective and subjective criteria, even completely non-democratic jurisdictions like Hong Kong are able to do better than India because out of the eight indicators included for free and fair elections, most of them just have to do with the procedural aspects of elections. For example, is the electoral role complete? Is there violence at the polls? Do people pay for votes? Now on all of those metrics, Hong Kong gets a perfect score, yet Hong Kong has no actual democratic choice. As a result, on free and fair elections, again one of the five sub-indices of electoral democracy at VDEM, India actually ranks 20 places worse than Hong Kong. As a result of these methodological quirks, almost all of the analytical power, the discretionary power in the VDEM rankings comes from two completely subjective sub-indices that is from the freedom of association and freedom of expression sub-indices. Here there's a lot more room for interpretation and of course India has suffered in these rankings because India has been characterized largely by its own intellectual class as being no longer a place where there's freedom of expression and freedom of association. However, when I see freedom of association in India put on a par with that in a communist country like Vietnam, when I see freedom of expression in India put on a par with Iran, it seems to me highly unlikely that we can take these subjective measures at face value. The result of all of this is that India, in effect, gets no credit for having an objective democracy that is a place where people can vote in genuine elections for officials of their choice to represent them. However, on the subjective sub-indices it is savaged by people primarily Indians who feel that India is no longer a place that it's freedom of association or freedom of expression. Again, whether or not that's true is in the eye of the beholder as an international analyst it simply seems unlikely that the problems in India to the extent they exist are as bad as the problems in places like Vietnam and Iran. The net result of this is that India gets no credit for being objectively democratic but is savaged for being subjectively perceived to be non-democratic by people who answer the BDEM survey. The net result is that India gets a ranking of one hundredth in the world on the BDEM rankings which is, in effect, worst in the world among countries that actually have elections without getting any credit for actually holding those elections what democracy really should be all about. This report is being released March 1st as a launch report for the Indian Century Round Table think tank. I hope you'll read it and take a look at it. It is a much more technical, statistical, methodological investigation of the most important of the three rankings, the BDEM rankings. It's not all based on an analysis of the text involved in describing the rankings. It is an analysis of the rankings themselves and of the statistical methodology behind it. I think you'll find it enlightening and I hope you find it enjoyable.